Free men are not equal, equal men are not free.

Thursday, March 16, 2017

You Can't Fix What's Broken For Them

While the general point of the article is on a different topic, this paragraph by Scott Adams is worthy of some discussion all by itself:
When I was younger and dumber I thought I could transform unhappy people into happy people by giving them whatever they wanted, or fixing whatever they thought was broken. This approach worked approximately zero times. Once a dopamine addict’s alleged problem is fixed, the addict still needs the next high. So they magnify small problems into big ones just to feel something. Or they create a problem where there was none. 
There are indeed miserable people who - all protests to the contrary - wallow in their misery. It's not just restricted to borderlines and cluster-B types who are nothing but a ball of fear and misery insofar as anyone can tell. The person who is so addicted to the rush of drama they simply have to manufacture some where none exists over the tiniest things.

It's a given among those with experience treating addicts of any sort that you cannot fix them - they have to fix themselves, and they will likely only do so when there is no other option, when they're down as far as one can be. A significant percentage don't before something fatal happens. 

Anything you do to help them out with their self-caused disasters, and eventually even simple human kindness, simply enables them, allows them to avoid their problems and the mess it's causing with their lives.

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